


Contemporary Pessimism

by elumish



Series: Referential Illusion [2]
Category: Stargate - All Series, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-27
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-03-26 01:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3831580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elumish/pseuds/elumish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles from Referential Illusions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Drinking

**Author's Note:**

> Drabbles will be posted as I write them (except for spoiler-y ones, which will be posted after they stop being spoiler-y.
> 
> Set any time during Unity after Chapter 15 (8).

It was awkward, not drinking on Atlantis. There were a few Muslim members of the expeditions—though, like many of the more religious members, some such as Dr. Ahmad were finding themselves torn between questioning their faith and clinging on to it for dear life—and Dr. Cho was allergic to alcohol, but otherwise, drinking was a social experience and a solidarity one.

Dr. Ellen Allor, xenoanthropologist—a title she never in a million years would have thought she would have—didn’t drink. It wasn’t for medical reasons, or religious ones; she just didn’t like the taste of alcohol or the feeling she got from drinking it.

Though, after the month they had just had, she was considering it. Go to one of the “we’re not dead” parties that they always told her she was invited to, find the strongest stuff they had, and guzzle it until everything turned soft and hazy and didn’t hurt quite so much.

Because her friends were dead. That was one thing that no amount of training, no number of lectures on life in the Pegasus Galaxy could prepare her for. They were dead, they were gone, they were never coming back. It was a concept she could grasp on a macro level—had to be able to, to be an anthropologist—but that she couldn’t quite wrap her head around on a personal level. She didn’t know how anyone could, how anyone could stand living with it for so long.

She knew that, by Pegasus standards, she was relatively innocent. She was new-generation Atlantis, had come on the trip from Earth to their new planet in the Pegasus Galaxy. But she had seen things that most people on Earth—or at least in America—could never begin to imagine. The scale of devestation, of destruction, of death—it kept her up at night. Because how could you sleep in a galaxy full of things wanting to eat you?

Hence the desire to drink.

Though there was another reason, too. Without alcohol, people didn’t talk. Not really. They were too scared, all the time, and they only unwound once they started drinking. And as much as she wanted company, she had played the game of being the only sober one in the room, and it was even less fun on Atlantis than back home.

So usually she just sat in her room and reread the books on her e-reader until she couldn’t stand the words anymore, and then she unraveled her scarf and reknitted it with a different pattern because that way she never ran out of yarn. But sometimes, when the days got really bad, she sat in the hallway just outside of one of the parties and just _listened_. Because that was the only way she could know that they were still alive.


	2. Permission

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set pre-Unity

Sam was fairly certain Jack had lost his mind. Or her ears had stopped working. Or, with not a not insubstantial possibility, both.

“Can you say that again?”

“We’re getting married.”

Nope, she had heard it right the first time. “You do realize that our relationship isn’t exactly…above board.”

He grinned at her from where he was leaning against the back of the couch, watching her ostensibly fill out transfer paperwork. “That’s why I’m going to get permission. From the _President_.”

At that point, Sam gave up the pretense of actually reading the forty-seven pages in front of her to face Jack head-on. “You’re going to call the President of the United States and say…what? ‘I want to hypothetically marry a hypothetical Colo—Brigadier General who has spent a decent amount of her career under my command. Go or no go?’”

His widening grin told her he had caught her slip, though he didn’t comment on it, saying, “No, I’m going to call the President and say, ‘I’m going to marry Brigadier General Samantha Carter, and you can either give me permission or I’ll retire.’”

Oh. “Jack, you can’t retire. This is—Homeworld needs you.”

“I retired once. Or…twice. Whatever. I can do it again.” The smile slipped from his face, and she saw his expression shutter closed. “Unless you don’t want to marry me. Which is fine. I mean, you don’t need to—there’s no need for you to feel you have to—if you don’t want to—”

Sam was on her feet and across the space between them before he could finish what he was saying. She was close, now, close enough to see the scar above his eyebrow, the spot he had missed when he was shaving, the brown of his eyes. “I’ve wanted to marry you since I was a Major.” Her cheeks heated at the words, but she had to say them. “I still want to marry you now. But I don’t want to—the accusations against you could be—”

He looked down at her, one hand cupping her cheek. “I’m sure you’ll attest to my character.” And then he leaned down and kissed her, and she melted against him in a way that had embarrassed her at first, but she was over that now, over being ashamed of her feelings for Jack O’Neill. And then he pulled back and grinned. “Now I have a phone call to make.”


	3. Livestock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set anytime (though ostensibly before Chapter 30 (16)).

Atlantis had more vegetarians for non-religious moral reasons than any other group of people Dr. Reiner had ever interacted with.

She wasn’t sure she would even have known this fact, except the notes from Dr. Heightmeyer—which were still used even though there had been three Atlantis psychologists in the interim—had a special marking in shorthand that stood for exactly that.

Dr. Reiner, who was used to dealing with soldiers in combat situations, didn’t see the significance of this for a while. Not until Lieutenant Allen walked in for his required check-up after an off-world mission that had gone badly (when would she start finding that normal?) and she opened the file and saw that, just below the shorthand note were the words “don’t ask.”

Which was not normal for a psychologist. Psychologists asked. They questioned. If something was odd, they asked some more, until they could figure out why it was odd and, if necessary, help the person work through it.

So she asked.

Lieutenant Allen shot her the hardest look she had ever seen, and she had worked with POWs who thought that psychologists were one step above torturers, snapped, “We’re livestock too,” and walked out. And then refused to come back.

Six months later, Dr. Badawi talked about it without prompting, his fingers curled in his lap, his head down. He was a botanist. “It’s so easy to hate the Wraith for killing humans, but what we do…it is perhaps not better. Livestock are not sentient, but…” He looked up at her then, and there was something scared in his dark eyes. “What if they were?”

Dr. Reiner picked at her stew that night, which was made from some sort of alien fish they traded for regularly. But in the end, she ate it.

She asked one of the cooks about it next, not during a regular session but because they were both eating at the same table and making conversation was what she did. He shot her an odd look, one she was used to getting as a psychologist, where people wondered if she was asking because she wanted to diagnose them with some mental illness, or where they thought she wanted them to rat on a friend or coworker. Because their allegiances were to each other—in Atlantis more than anywhere else she had ever seen—and she was an imposed outsider, tolerated because of orders and because some people were willing to admit that others might need her. Never themselves.

Finally, he answered, “We make sure to always have a vegetarian option.”

“Do you ask?”

He met her eye. “We don’t need to.”

And that was the end of that conversation.

What she found most strange, though, were not the vegetarians, not exactly, but the people who ate meat as an act of defiance. They ate meat because the Wraith ate humans; they wanted to prove that they were better than the Wraith despite their culinary chooses, or because of them.

She thought this would cause friction, some sort of moral divide like she saw at home with some of the more radical vegans who insisted that anyone who got anywhere near an animal product was perpetrating animal cruelty. She started looking for it, watching during mealtimes as morality vegetarians sat across from defiance omnivores and struck up conversations about physics or Star Wars or other planets.

But the blowup she had seen as inevitable never came. No vegetarian started ranting about the cruelty of the meal, no omnivores attacked them for giving in. Nobody even seemed to notice.

And then she realized—when the invasion was at the gate, there were no enemies in foxholes.


	4. Someday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set any time during Unity.

Catherine wished that Dr. Allor drank.

Some people were angry drunks. Other were happy drunks. Catherine was a lovey drunk. It was only when she got a little bit wasted that she let herself fall in love, and all she could think every time was that she wished Ellen would drink too so the two of them could do what they wanted and in the morning pretend that they didn’t remember it.

Because otherwise, when she woke, all she had was the shame and the voice of her babushka telling her that she was going to hell. So she didn’t do anything. She just wanted from afar and watched from close up because it was the only thing that was safe. It was the only thing that wouldn’t poison what she felt, because otherwise the resentment would grow until she couldn’t stand to look at her before.

She had been down this road before.

And one of these days, she told herself, she would do something while sober, do something in public, something they would both remember—and so would everyone else. She would do something she couldn’t take back, something she wouldn’t want to take back, and then they could just move on from there. Because it was the first time that was the hardest. That first big hurdle where they pushed past their history and their prejudice and the words in their head before the rising of dawn that weren’t really their words but belong to them all the same.

One day.


	5. Silence

Claire has been mute for her entire life.

The stories goes that when she was born, she started crying, and everybody freaked the hell out because they couldn’t hear it. At all. There was air going in and out of her mouth and tears running down her face but there was no sound. So she spent the next four days in the hospitals as they tried to figure out what was going on.

The answer was vocal cord damage. Why was there vocal cord damage? Nobody knows. But there was, and so she cannot produce sounds. At all. Ever.

Of course, the fact that she can’t speak is almost always taken to mean that she can’t hear and she won’t speak. Which is totally not the case. She can hear fine. Better than fine. She’s a master at hearing. She just can’t do a damn thing about it once she does hear what someone says, because most people don’t know sign language, and even fewer know Quebec Sign Language.

And it’s not like she never meant to learn American Sign Language, but it’s like learning English if all you know is French (except she grew up with both of those so it’s probably more like then trying to learn Spanish), and she never had the time, because she went to University in Quebec and knows how to wrote out what she needs to say on a board or use a speech synthesizer perfectly well. In two languages, no less.

And on Atlantis, if you aren’t Dr. McKay or Dr. Zelenka you probably won’t get talk during a time when it needs to be done quickly anyway, so the fact that nobody can understand a damn thing she’s saying is kind of irrelevant. She mostly just sits there and does her math and her physics and checks Dr. Kinor’s math because he has a tendency to fuck up exponents (and how does someone with a PhD in electrical engineering manage to do that badly with exponents, anyway?).

And then the ZedPM almost blows up and suddenly she’s important and, more than that, suddenly someone knows what she’s saying. And it’s terrifying.


End file.
